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Science has revealed the cause of ‘Resting B!tch Face’ (6 Photos)

Resting Bitch Face (RBF) is the term the internet likes to use to describe somebody whose face appears unintentionally annoyed, angry, or irritated. Two behavioral researchers with international research and innovation firm Noldus Information Technology, Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth, decided to do a little research on the topic. “We wanted this to be fun and kind of tongue-in-cheek, but also to have legitimate scientific data backing it up,” Macbeth said.

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The duo used Noldus’s FaceReader, which maps more than 500 points on the human face, to identify what features cause RBF. The FaceReader assigns expression percentages to 8 basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and neutral. They first established a baseline with a group of expressionless faces which registered 97% in neutrality. The remaining 3% contained “little blips of emotion” but nothing significant.

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Next they scanned the faces of well known people with RBF such as Kristen Stewart, Kanye West, and Queen Elizabeth. With these faces, the neutrality dropped to 94%. “The big change in percentage came from ‘contempt,’” Macbeth said. This increase in contempt was caused by things like having one side of the lip pulled back slightly or a little squinting of the eyes.

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“Something in the neutral expression of the face is relaying contempt, both to the software and to us,” said Macbeth. However, there was one difference in the way FaceReader was perceiving RBF. RBF is generally associated with women, Kanye West being one of the few male exceptions. FaceReader recognized RBF in both men and women in equal frequencies which shows our gender bias as humans.

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Want to know if you have RBF? Just send a photo of your expressionless face to jason@noldus.com and the FaceReader will tell you how bitchy you look. You can also read Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth’s published results from the original study HERE.

Chive Media Group

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